I decided to update the “About me” page, go take a look, I think it’s quite interesting …

I’ve spent the past 2 weeks on and off reading ‘Bugs in Writing’ and have definitely learned about some mistakes to avoid in writing. In order to fix these mistakes, it is best to do a lot of your own writing so you can find them and eliminate them. I will try to write a brief note about some common mistakes here. I haven’t asked the author for permission, so I will try to do it here in a very general and concise manner.

#1. Avoid using passive voice. Passive voice just means that when you say something about the world or some event that happened, make sure you identify ‘who or what’ was involved. The ‘who or what’ is commonly referred to as an agent.

For example,

Wrong:
The tea was made.
The program was written.
The computer was dropped.

Correct:
Mark made the tea.
Jane wrote this computer program.
Christopher dropped the computer.

#2. Speak directly to your reader. Never address your audience as the reader or refer to yourself as the author. You should speak directly to your reader. You should refer to her as you. If you are the sole author of a book, use I and if you have co-authors, use we. In addition, avoid using one, as in One should realize … or One has written.

#3. So, So that and Such that. Just remember the following:

So means therefore
So that means in order that
Such that means in such a way that

#4. Two or more. Use the terms between, each other, either, and a couple to refer to precisely two entities; and you should use among, one another, any one of, and several to refer to more than two entities.

I will add some more tips later on, but probably not many. The problem is that I haven’t gotten permission from the author and several of the tips have examples that are best quoted verbatim from the book.

I know I haven’t updated this blog for a while … in fact I frequently abandon it for a few months while I carry on with life’s struggles. Keeping up with my job, finding time to spend with my beautiful wife, all the while attempting to keep current with the fast pace of technology growth.

Starting today, I will try and change that. You see, in order to motivate myself to keep this blog updated I have decided to set myself a goal and complete it. I will keep updating this blog not only with my progress, but will also write about what I have learned as I go along.

So my first goal will be ‘to improve my writing skills’. I have enjoyed writing stuff for a long time now and friends have occasionally told me that ‘you could be a really good writer’. Well I’ve finally decided I should give it a shot.

To be honest, I’ve never been good at grammar, and people find that hard to believe. I’ve simply developed a good ear for what ’sounds right’ based on my perusal of several newspapers, magazines, novels and books over the years. Learning a lot of vocabulary while preparing for my SATs and reading ‘lots’ has really helped.

The first book I’m going to try and read and understand is going to be Bugs in Writing, which I bought several years ago, but never got around to reading. It is written mainly for people who come from a scientific or technical background and hence is perfectly suited for someone like me. Each chapter aims to analyse and fix a single ‘problem’ and you can read each chapter in whatever order you like.

With that, I bid you farewell. I believe my next post is going to be about ‘passive/active voice’. Exciting times indeed

I’ve been waiting for so long now to import my old WP blog from my old web server to this site. The problem has been that until now, wordpress.com blogs did not have an ‘Import Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog’ option so I couldn’t move my older blog across. The only option I had was to spend many days manually adding all of my posts to kerneljack.wordpress.com and correcting all the dates, which would have been a nightmare.

Thankfully I just discovered the wordpress-to-wordpress plugin which allows me to export my old blog as a WXR file which wordpress.com can then import. Now that I am back I will try to keep updating this blog more often.

Yahoo has started a new RSS + SMS service, but reading about it, I’m really not sure what I use I would put it to:
RSS + SMS

As Russ has already mentioned, it’s typical use case is not the elite digerati who subscribes to 500 feeds, it is instead useful if you have a more focused feed (let’s say within a company) and want employees to be alerted to certain critical events. The use cases i’ve thought of so far that might work for me are:

- Sysadmins being texted when there are new updates on a server? This is assuming that whoever provides the updates publishes an RSS feed to go along with it.
- Employees being texted reminders from their Outlook or iCal calendars. A lot of online calendaring apps like Backpack allow you to publish your reminders as RSS feeds so you should be able to get alerts for those.
- Any other scenario where someone needs to stay updated on a certain topic every hour or so. I assume you can configure the Yahoo service to send alerts out only every hour or so, so it sends them in a “batch” format instead of 10 updates per hour. This should help alleviate the 50 updates an hour problem.

The only problem I see is that I’m sure people *already* have ways of doing this stuff. I can easily write a script that checks my server for updates every day and sends me an alert or email about it. Granted, Yahoo’s service is supposed to be free, and SMS will cost me, but still, it’s already been done.

When this comes to the UK (if), I’ll probably configure it to send me an alert about system updates for my servers, etc. If there isn’t an RSS for it, I’ll create it.

We had a great time on our trip to Oxford last weekend … I took quite a few pics, particularly of the landscape while on the train but many didn’t turn out so well. The trip itself was great, we took a full bus tour and saw most of the interesting sites, from Christ Church to the Carfax tower and the [Museum of the History of Science](http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/). They’ve got an original blackboard there on which Einstein scribbled some equations for determining the age of the Universe! It’s pretty cool to see that.Overall Oxford seems a pretty small and tightly knit town which is absolutely full to the brim with students. I have never seen so many bicycles in my life! All the campuses and colleges, etc are so close together in a small space that students simply ride their bikes to wherever they need to go. All those bicycles reminding me of China in a way.

I’ve put up the best pictures I could find at [Flickr](http://www.flickr.com/photos/kerneljack). The best thing about Flickr is that you can simply search for all pictures tagged with “oxford” and you will see a LOT more than we got to get; there are just so many people taking pictures and uploading them to Flickr that you can find pictures from almost anywhere.

Discovered Buzztracker through Slashdot today. What I really like about buzztracker is that it allows me to see at a glance what the most talked about news items are for today. What it’s really doing is mining Google News and creating links between the geographic locations of articles. It’s quite useful to check out the popular news for the day.

Here is a glimpse of what the map was like today:

* Baghdad (38%)
* Vatican (13%)
* Rome (05%)
* Boston (04%)
* Islamabad (04%)
* Cairo (04%)
* Khartoum (03%)
* Beijing (03%)
* Washington (02%)
* Delhi (02%)
* Kathmandu (02%)
* Mosul (02%)
* Pyongyang (02%)
* New Delhi (02%)
* Moscow (02%)
* Oslo (01%)
* Tokyo (01%)
* Chicago (01%)
* Beirut (01%)
* Jerusalem (01%)

Notice the list associated with this map which is quite useful as an adjunct to the map, showing you more clearly what the picture doesn’t. I will definitely use this from time to time to see what’s popular newswise *at the moment*. The great thing is they publish an RSS feed, which easily keeps you updated within your aggregator of choice.

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc

This is very cool, I’ve always admired Carmack for his technical abilities and his abilities to quickly get down and dirty with any new technology. For example in his post about mobile games he starts off with “dusting off my java in a nutshell book” and then talks in details about java’s threading issues, mobile latency issues, java bytecode disassembly, portability issues, timing issues, circuit switching standards.

Very refreshing reading and definitely something to look up to. I wish all tech people had this much intimate knowledge of the platforms they work on everyday. I know that at least I will try even harder to achieve this from now on.

The only thing disappointing about the site is the lack of a feed to subscribe to, RSS, Atom, whatever so I’ve bookmarked the page in http://del.icio.us/kerneljack instead.

A superb blogging app written in Java, and it also allows you to save your state so you can pick up where you left off on a computer other than your regular one. Just try it using the supplied Webstart link; you don’t need to create an account the default list of supplied feeds is excellent.

Some cool stuff on the Ars Technica Holiday Gift Buying Guide. Mmm.. iPaq
Superb commentary and speculation from Russ on the iPhone This sounds plausible, but a lot of the comments against it also make sense. Apple will have to compete in the market that is already swamped really badly, and they will also have to deal with the mobile phone operators. In short, a lot of work in a lot of new territory for them, if they take up the challenge.

Finally, music artists have come up with a way to earn money and circumvent the music industry through weedshare, and online service that allows artists to put up their own songs and charge as much as they want for them, but usually up to a dollar for a song. I think it’s a great idea, if it takes off that is. At least artists now seem to be starting to move towards a model where they make their own rules and earn their own keep on their own terms. Also, the more you share and other people share the better. This is better explained in this section in the FAQ:

The concept is pretty basic: Weed rewards people who share files and respect artists’ rights.

You can play a Weed file three times for free on any PC. After three free plays, you’re asked to pay for the file. You can use any current Windows Media-compatible player software to play the file. The Weed software, which keeps track of your account information, is used to purchase files.

Once you purchase a Weed file, you’re free to play it all you want on up to three PCs. You also can burn the file to CD and play it on your stereo system, or transfer it to a portable device like the Creative Labs Nomad, the Rio S10, or any current Windows CE PDA.

Best of all, you can share Weed files with anyone you like, as long as the files remain in their original form as Windows Media files. And if someone you share a file with purchases that file, you’ll earn a payment for helping to distribute it.

Specifically, the artist always receives 50% of each sale, and the rest goes to those who helped distribute the file. You get 20%, the person who shared the file with you gets 10%, and the person who shared the file with that person gets 5% of the sale price. Weed receives the final 15% for service and software maintenance costs.

All purchases and distributor payments are made into your Weed account through PayPal. Deposits and withdrawals from your Weed account cost 50 cents, but all other transactions are free. You must have a PayPal account to make deposits to your Weed account.

Some friends were over and I took some pictures of their baby daugher which they loved. My Olympus camera is over 3 years old right now and this got me thinking about what new stuff is available. I bought my 3 megapixel Olympus camera for about 300 pounds and now the superb Canon IXUS 5 Megapixel is only 239 pounds! It’s quite an amazing camera, more than good enough for a lot of things. A great recommendation.